Chapter 15 - Radio Silence

"Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage."

—Lao Tzu

The days aboard The Triumph settled into a routine of maintenance and calibrations, broken up by movie nights that Joey insisted were "critical for morale." They were getting closer to the Oort Cloud passage every day, the point of no return where they’d finally ignite the FTL drive. Luca could feel it in the crew. The jokes were a little louder. The silences a little longer.

Calibration sequences with the Genesis Platform became the new normal. Hours on the bridge with Emily and Zoe, coordinating with Isabel Torin’s team back home, tweaking sensor arrays and running pre-flight diagnostics for the Vanguard drive. It was boring as hell, but if they got it wrong, they died, so boring was what they got.

Engineering, under Ryan and Chris’s often-competitive supervision, ensured the power systems could handle the projected load. Those two were always fighting, but they got the job done. Danny lived in his science lab, cross-referencing their sensor data with Genesis’s long-range astronomical charts. The kid was brilliant, no question. Joey kept them fed and, remarkably, sane. How he managed it, Luca had no idea.

Today’s session was wrapping up. They’d been working with Isabel on the FTL’s primary energy conduits, and she was giving her final sign-off for the cycle.

"Alright, Triumph," Isabel was saying, her voice crisp despite the light-lag, "we’re seeing stable energy fluctuations across the primary manifold. Your adjustments to the magnetic containment fields look good from here. That concludes the scheduled diagnostics for this window. We’ll pick up with the pre-ignition sequence simulations tomorrow, same time."

Over the bridge speakers, Athan, who’d been observing in silence until then, gave them a brief nod in his voice. "Good work, everyone. Stay sharp, Luca. You’re making good time." Even without seeing him, Luca could hear the rare, small smile in it, and it made him stand a little taller.

"Copy that, Genesis Control. Thanks, Isabel. Thanks, Dad," Luca replied. He let himself feel good about it for about three seconds before his brain moved on to the next thing that could kill them.

Emily was already closing down the secure comms channel. "Alright, that's us for today with Genesis. Zoe, run a final sweep on the long-range array before you power it down to standby."

Just as the connection to Genesis blinked out, a new notification pinged on Emily’s primary console: an incoming data transmission. It was tagged with Genesis Platform’s encryption keys and handshake protocols, but it hadn’t been announced. Isabel had clearly signed off. Athan hadn’t mentioned any further uploads.

"Hold on," Emily said, her brow furrowing. "We’ve got another incoming packet." She looked at him, a question in her eyes. "They didn’t say anything about a priority update, did they?"

"No," Luca said, and something cold dropped through his stomach. "Isabel said simulations tomorrow." He leaned over to check the data stream signature on the secondary display. Standard Genesis encryption. But Isabel had signed off ten seconds ago, and Athan hadn't said a word about follow-up data.

An unscheduled packet from a channel that had just gone dark. With Genesis encryption that nobody on the Genesis end had sent. Luca's brain finished the sentence before he was out of his chair.

"Ryan!" Luca yelled, picking up the intercomm microphone and shoving back from his chair so hard it scraped against the deck. "Kill the downlink to Engineering! Quarantine it! Now!"

On the bridge speakers, Ryan sounded confused, tools clattering in the background. "Uh, Captain? What packet? We just got the all-clear from Isabel. We were about to cycle down…"

"There's an unscheduled priority update coming through, Ryan! Don't open it!" Luca slammed his fist on the console. "Emily, Zoe, isolate that data stream! Full quarantine, highest level!"

Emily was rerouting the incoming data to a firewall-protected server block before he finished the sentence. Zoe had deep-level intrusion scans running two seconds later.

Nobody said anything. Luca’s pulse was hammering so hard he could feel it in his teeth. If that packet had made it through, if Ryan had opened it on the engineering end, they would have lost the ship in the middle of nowhere, just like that, and it would have been game over.

"They’re listening," Zoe said finally, her voice flat, echoing the thought that was now screaming in Luca’s own head. "They have to be. To know our calibration schedule and spoof Genesis encryption keys. This isn’t random. Our comms are compromised."

Luca stepped into the corridor and pulled the panel off the wall server housing. Zoe was right behind him.

"Let me use my [Port Scanner] ability, hold on, see what I can do here," she said, crouching and hooking up her hacking pad. She went quiet for a moment. "Routing path's been scrubbed. Not all the way, though. Three relay nodes, all spoofed as automated traffic. Someone fed them our calibration window from inside Genesis."

Emily nodded, her expression grim. "Which means every official transmission, every data burst we’ve sent or received, could have been intercepted. They know our progress…"

"And they’ll know we caught this one," Luca finished. "They’ll adapt. Try something else." One ship. No backup. An enemy smart enough to spoof Genesis encryption and time it to the second. Whoever was doing this was better at this game than he was, and that pissed him off more than it scared him.

"We need to warn Dad," Luca said, already moving towards the comms station Emily had vacated. "He needs to know Genesis Platform’s outbound channels might be compromised too, or that there’s a serious internal leak." He trusted Dad, but someone at Genesis had to be playing them.

"Assuming we can even get a clean message through," Zoe muttered, already running diagnostics on their own transmission buffers, looking for any signs of prior tampering.

"We have to try," Emily said, her gaze steady on his. "Use the tight-beam."

It took a few agonizing minutes to re-establish a secure link back to Dad’s private channel on Genesis Platform. When his face appeared on screen, Luca knew immediately that he’d seen the emergency flag. Dad didn’t look like that unless something was wrong.

"Luca? What’s happened?"

"Dad," Luca said, keeping his voice as level as he could, "we received an unscheduled data packet immediately after your last transmission. Genesis encryption, priority override. It wasn’t from you."

Emily was already typing a summary of their findings in his peripheral vision, ready to transmit it if the verbal comm failed.

"The packet contained malware," Luca continued. “Designed to hijack the ship's systems and trigger a shutdown. We quarantined and neutralized it." Barely, he thought. Too damn close.

Athan’s expression hardened. "Compromised," he said low, more to himself than to them. He looked away from the camera for a moment, then back, his jaw tight. "Understood, Luca. We’ll initiate a full security sweep on our end, assume all outbound channels are vulnerable. Good work."

There was a pause, the light-lag stretching the silence. "This changes things," Athan said finally. He paused, and when he continued, he spoke slowly. "If they can inject data into your secure stream, they’re almost certainly monitoring your telemetry and standard comms. They’ll anticipate your next move, your FTL jump point."

"What are you saying?" Luca asked, though he already had a sinking feeling he knew the answer.

"Radio silence, Luca. Starting now. Lock down all inbound channels. No received transmissions, no incoming data, nothing. That’s how they got to you today, and that’s how they’ll try again. You can still send, but anything coming in is a potential weapon." He sighed, the weariness evident. "Your FTL drive is your only true advantage now. They won’t be able to track you once you make that jump, not if they don’t know your exit vector and timing beforehand. This is what they wanted, I think. To isolate you and force a mistake."

"What about critical updates? Mission progress?" Emily interjected, leaning into the frame.

"Negative, Emily. Not until you’re out. The risk is too high. Any data you receive could be a weapon or a tracker." Athan looked directly at Luca. "Your mission parameters remain the same: reach Alpha Centauri, conduct your survey, and return with the data. How you do that now, with this new constraint… that’s on you, Captain."

Luca's stomach dropped. No more guidance from Genesis. No more incoming data, no more updates, no safety net. Just seven idiots in a spaceship flying blind.

"If there are any… personal messages," Athan continued, quieter now, "anything you or the crew need to send before you go dark, record them. Package them. Send one final burst. Make it count. After that, nothing until you come back.” He looked at his watch. "You have one hour. Then I want confirmation that The Triumph is silent. Understood?"

"Understood, Commander,” Luca replied, his own voice serious.

"Be safe, Luca. All of you." His image flickered, and then the screen went dark, the connection severed from his end.

One hour to say everything that mattered to everyone who mattered, and then nothing. Radio silence until they came home. If they came home.

"Alright," Luca said, turning to Emily and Zoe. "You heard him. One hour. Pass the word to the crew. Anyone who wants to send a message, get it recorded. We’ll beam it out in sixty minutes. After that…"

Emily nodded and was out the door before he finished.

The final encrypted data burst went out an hour later. Then they went dark. Primary comms array off. Long-range sensors switched to passive-only. The bridge got quiet in a way Luca didn’t like, quiet enough to remind him there was nothing out here but them.

---

Joey decided the best way to deal with impending doom or groundbreaking interstellar travel was with a full stomach. A few hours later, the mess hall was filled with the surprisingly comforting aroma of what he was calling "Emergency Morale Meatloaf." It smelled a damn sight better than any emergency ration.

They filled their plates and ate. The tension loosened up enough for actual conversation after a few minutes, and Ryan, predictably, was the first to go there. The guy never knew when to shut up.

"So, that FTL drive, eh?" he said, mouth half-full of meatloaf. He gestured vaguely with his fork towards the engineering deck. "All those calibrations we did with Genesis… you think they were actually enough before we got cut off? That last ‘diagnostic package’ sure wasn’t helping."

Chris looked up. He had been meticulously cutting his meatloaf into perfect squares. "The core jump mechanism itself is solid. Pre-System principles mostly, just… exponentially more powerful. That part’ll work. The Vanguard’s design is sound. The question, as always, is the new stuff.” Chris wasn't wrong; the new stuff was always where everything went sideways.

Danny, who’d been sketching something on a napkin, again, chimed in, his brow furrowed in thought. "It’s the Reality Anchor Field I’m most concerned about. According to the schematics Athan managed to send before… well, before… generating it is one thing, but the precision is what worries me."

Luca’s fork stopped halfway to his mouth. "Explain, Danny. For those of us who didn’t swallow the advanced theoretical physics textbook."

Danny went a little red at being the center of attention, but pushed on. "Right. So, the FTL drive doesn’t just… push us through space. First, it has to establish what the Vanguard schematics call a ‘Reality Anchor Field.’ It’s essentially a localized containment bubble that stabilizes The Triumph’s quantum state. Keeps us tethered to the known laws of physics while the actual FTL drive… well, it sort of skips us between the normal folds of spacetime."

Skipping between folds of spacetime. That was very cool and a totally normal thing to do on a Tuesday.

"So, a glorified shield?" Zoe asked.

"More than that," Chris corrected, surprisingly knowledgeable. "It’s what prevents us from turning into a shower of exotic particles the moment we exceed light speed. It maintains our structural integrity and temporal consistency. Basically, it stops the universe from saying ‘nope’ and erasing us."

"Exactly," Danny said, nodding eagerly. "The drive will generate the field, that’s almost guaranteed. The raw power is there. But the calibration we were doing with Genesis, the stuff that got cut short by that… interference… that was all about shaping and maintaining the field’s integrity and, crucially, its dimensions."

He picked up a breadstick, holding it up. "Imagine this is The Triumph. The field needs to encompass the entire ship, every nacelle, every antenna, with a stable buffer zone. If it’s too small…" He snapped the breadstick. "...parts of the ship could be exposed to raw FTL-transition stresses. Bad."

"And if it's too big?" Emily asked.

"Too big, and it draws an exponentially larger amount of power from the primary FTL capacitors just to maintain itself," Ryan jumped in, not smiling anymore. "Leaving less juice for the actual… uh… ‘skip-jump’ as Danny put it. We might not have the range to make it to Alpha Centauri in one go. Or worse, the field could become unstable under the strain, flicker during the jump."

The field could flicker and reality right along with it, and Luca put his fork down.

Zoe, who’d been silently demolishing her meatloaf, finally spoke. "So, what you’re saying is, we’re about to bet our lives on a system that’s maybe seventy-five percent calibrated, hoping the bubble it makes is ‘just right’ like some kind of glove?”

Nobody touched their plates. Under the table, Emily's hand found his. He squeezed back, holding on a beat longer than he meant to.

"The initial field generation simulations we did complete with Genesis looked promising," Danny offered, though his voice lacked its usual certainty. "The energy draw was, perhaps, within projected limits for a stable, correctly sized anchor. But those were simulations without the final fine-tuning from that last, corrupted, data package."

"So, we’re flying a bit blind on the final parameters," Luca summarized. "We have to trust the work we’ve done so far and trust that Ryan and Chris can manage the power flow during ignition if things get… unpredictable."

Ryan and Chris exchanged a look.

"We’ll manage the power," Ryan said. "We always do."

"The question is," Chris added quietly, "what’s an acceptable margin of error when you’re talking about reality itself unraveling around the edges of the ship?"

No one had an answer for that. Forks scraped plates again after a while, but the conversation was done. Luca’s hand was still holding Emily’s beneath the table, and he didn’t let go.

---

Later that evening, Emily was in the observation lounge, standing at the viewport with her arms crossed. Luca had already recorded his messages to Matteo and Alessio, stuffed them full of jokes and "everything’s great" bullshit that he didn’t fully believe. He’d told them to stay out of trouble. He’d told them he loved them. What else was there?

"Heard from your brothers?" she asked without turning from the viewport.

"Yeah," Luca said, moving to stand beside her. "Got a burst back from the last batch. Alessio's complaining about school, Matteo's bragging about some new weapons mod they found in a portal. The usual." He paused. "You... hear from anyone?"

Emily was silent for a long moment. The red hoodie he’d lent her back on Genesis, the one she still wore sometimes when off-duty, was folded neatly on a nearby seat. She hadn’t returned it, and he hadn’t asked. It was a small, unspoken thing between them now.

"No," she said, so quiet he barely caught it. "Mom's... probably busy." She said it the way she always said it, like if she kept her voice light enough it wouldn't hurt. "You know how she is with her kids, those little projects she takes on. And my stepdad…" A shrug so small it was almost nothing. The guy never reached out. He wouldn't. "And Pierre…" She paused longer this time. "Nothing. Not since we left." She turned from the viewport and tried to smile. "Busy, I guess."

Luca didn’t say anything for a second. She’d told him once, back on Genesis, about her dad walking out. About her mom starting over with a new husband, new kids, a new life that didn’t have much room for the daughter from before. He’d filed that away and never brought it up again, but he thought about it every time she checked her messages and came back with nothing.

He put his arm around her shoulders.

She leaned into him, her head resting against his shoulder.

"It's a long way," Luca said quietly. "Messages get lost. People get busy. Doesn't mean they're not thinking of you, Em."

She nodded, and they stood there for a while in silence, watching the stars.